2007/09/22

Reich early works.........

Steve ReichEarly Works (1987) [Compilation]

In 1965 in San Francisco, partly inspired by the phase experiments of Terry Riley's In C, Steve Reich was playing around with two identical tape loops he had recorded of a black Pentecostal preacher. Letting the loops go slightly out of phase, he became mesmerized by the complex sub-rhythms set up by the interference, the voice morphing into a pulsing Minimalist music. It's Gonna Rain lifts those three words out of the sermon, turning them into a rhythm -a flickering repeat that shears into depersonalized cyber tones. In a longer sequence, about people beseeching Noah to let them into the ark, the tape subdivides into eight loops of garbled counterpoint. In 1966 he pushed the voice of Daniel Hamm, arrested in the Harlem riots of 1964, even further towards a morass of hypnotic vibrations around the phrase "Come out to show them". A Techno prophecy

(FYI- this was #10 on The Wire's 100 works that set the world on fire while no one was listening)